With my Homemade Apple & Rosemary Baked Cheesecake and Speculaas Babka I already did some home baking on the blog and my respect goes out to all who bakes at home in their kitchen. But if we stand still and think for a second how far a few basic ingredients can bring us in a kitchen, then we would be amazed of how many baked goods you can put on the table using a bit a flour, eggs, sugar and some butter!
The truth be told, Nowhere can simplicity be as common as in a kitchen. It's almost magical that with only those four ingredients there are endless possibilities and combinations when it comes to baking. For instance, you could make a classic cake mixture, but if you leave out the eggs, you're suddenly making a shortbread biscuit. That's just one of many examples but not only by leaving ingredients out of the recipe you can make a difference but also by the way we utilise our ingredients we can. You could make your butter soft, melt it or make brown butter, and all of those procedures will give you different flavours or make a difference in texture. You're eggs and sugar are a great examples to, you can caramelise the sugar, make different types of meringue, from Swiss to Italian, make a sabayon, whisk in lots of air or almost none,... Anyways long story short...the possibilities are endless!
One of those possibilities is the good old fashioned "Madeleine" biscuit. A true classic coming from the Lorraine region in the northeast of France. A Madeleine is a sort of sponge cake, very similar to a Génoise sponge. Visually well known and recognised by their look. The mould that it's baked in is shaped like a shell and after the baking process they have a little bump on the top. When it comes to flavour, a Madeleine is most commonly scented with vanilla or lemon zeste and in "extreme" cases you might find some chocolate or pistachio variations here and there.
But if there's one thing you should have learned from recent posts on the road to hell and sweetness, then that's that we like to leave the rulebook behind and think outside of the box, therefore I've decided, with holidays like Halloween and thanksgiving vastly approaching, to make some spiced pumpkin madeleines.
45gr milk
45 gr orange blossom honey
2 gr salt
70 gr sugar
100 gr eggs
140 gr T55 flour
5gr baking powder
125 gr clarified butter
75 gr spiced pumpkin puree
We begin by roasting our pumpkin in some olive oil with a cinnamon stick, star anise, cloves, cardamom, nutmeg, white pepper, vanilla and some orange zeste in the oven to get some flavour out of that pumpkin. Of course adding all of those spices is up to yourself but once roasted we make a puree from the pumpkin and to make it a bit more smooth we add a bit of cream and a splash of orange juice. You could pass the puree through a tamis to make it extra smooth but for the madeleines that's not really necessary. Second up is our butter which we put to melt and clarify. Once clarified we leave that on the side so it can cool down a bit. After we take our eggs, sugar and salt and whisk them nicely together until nice and fluffy but not all the way to sabayon stage. We add the milk and orange blossom honey and mix well followed by our sieved flour and baking powder which we mix (fold) until we have a smooth batter. For our final step we fold in our roasted spiced pumpkin puree and let the mixture rest for 30min.
In that time you can prepare your mould for baking. In my case that's not really a big deal since I have one of those "home baking" type of mould. But if you have a cast iron type of Madeleine mould then you prepare them by greasing them in and cover them with a thin layer of flour. Baking we will do at about 190C for about 10 to 12min.
Once baked and out of the oven, we cool them down on a wired rack. Dipping then halfway in dark chocolate is definitely a possibility but in this case I chose to keep it plain. That leaves me just with wishing you guys a scary Halloween.
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